The beguinages: Cities within cities. Analysis of other hybrid types in the medieval city

This research explores domesticity in beguinages, these architectural organisations can be analysed as different medieval hybrid types, even more, as cities in their own right as well as cities within others. They emerged in the European medieval cities in the thirteenth century, and were inhabited by the beguines for almost eight centuries. This research aims to move forward towards a more architectural and gender perspective here by retrieving, revising and relating the work done by other investigators. This paper shows that it is possible to find in the past, the emergence of these new individuals (women) that break with the way of life based on the nuclear family and that have the will to transform the spatial conditions they inhabit, the house and the city that they have inherited. So that, this research intends to demonstrate how women were effective and the fact that this human-space relationship occurred with a gender perspective. Two issues are analysed, which reinforced each other: the changes they made in the spatial properties of the places they lived in and the multiple-uses that were in the beguinages, so these complexes served the needs of the larger community. Some of the architectural strategies employed in the beguinages that are recaptured and described here, contribute to enable us to better understand the complex genealogy of domesticity and must be incorporated in the historiography of the house and the western world, so that it is not only construed from the masculine experience. This research shows how women updated the existing domesticity by means of the beguinages, construed as cities within cities, as are heterotopias, in the Middle Ages. The work intends to value its usefulness by perceiving the past as it is, an immense ocean of knowledge weighed against the illusion of progress that ignores that which preceded it